@BPzeBanshee, I'm glad that part made sense and is reflected in the actual code. I've done a lot of sound production and knew what he was talking about, manual fades being a pretty standard part of working with audio. But the "loop point" terminology (his words) was a little confusing. I guess there isn't really a more eloquent or simple way to describe that.

Yeah I've always had a little bit of trouble explaining it to folks. It's much easier explained visually.

For those who aren't so savvy, some of G-Stream's tracks that had an intro piece was actually made into two tracks. Since apparently defining an automatic loop point for a single sound was not going to happen Fujino prebaked it instead with a fadein to stop it, presumably to stop it sounding clippy when going from the first track to the second. It just comes off as even weirder though because of that volume drop. If memory serves only Stage 2, 5A, and the not-Stage-1 boss themes had to make use of this.

Yeah, the sound hardware used doesn't allow playing from the middle of a track, so it was basically the only solution, though I don't really know why it'd need to fade out and back in since it switches tracks instantly. Maybe the dev hardware had delay between tracks, it certainly sounds like the dev hardware changed a lot during development.

Glad to see the T-S interview translated sooner than I expected. Much appreciation to blackoak.

It's too bad Fujino wasn't willing to go into detail about his dealings with the shady "Oriental Soft", and how he got shafted by the G-Stream PCBs being manufactured to extremely poor quality standards. (There is also the mysterious unemulated G-Stream revision with an alternate title screen.) Presumably Oriental were the ones who bailed on XII Stag, before Fujino was able to partner with Taito to get it released. Also interesting to learn that Naoto cut his teeth on Konami's M2 games.

Looking forward to Shooting Love Trilogy, which I hope does not become vaporware.

Toyota: Granada’s sales point? I would say it’s all fronts: graphics, sound, and the extensive enemy algorithms. You can take any big character sprite from any stage—we revised them over and over, only using the ones that finally satisfied us.

Quote:

Inoue: Toyota is by nature a huge fan of arcade games, so there may be parts in Granada that unconsciously reflect that influence. Granada itself is (Assault + Grobda) ÷ 2, right? (laughs)

Quote:

Akishino: Up till now, the way we’ve preceded with our game production is to first create a story, and after that match a game structure to it. Thanks to that, our games have always had sections with very poor balance. This time, with Granada, we created the gameplay first and made up the story afterwards. Maybe this means that Granada will have a weaker story than our previous games, but by the same extent, the action has had much more importance placed on it.

Toshio Toyota was already a cool cat in my book, not only for Granada but later one of my favourite mecha action games, Ex-Ranza. I always picked up a vintage arcade influence from the former, though it was more Robotron I thought of. Dead simple topdown shooting, concealing a trove of content in the quirks of its player and enemy "characters." Ranza's action is more console in nature, but that same craftsmanship is apparent all over the game.

Lovely to see Grobda mentioned, there's the impetus I needed to fire up Namco Museum Vol 2 and give it a proper look instead of going straight for Mappy.

bump with a couple new shmup interviews: a long Gokujou Parodius developer interview from 1994, and a shorter Mushihimesama Futari interview from 2006. I also translated the in-game dialogue between Reco and Palm... will probably do the other story/character text, unless it's been posted somewhere already? I found some dead links in old forum posts, so I'm not sure.

Looking at the patreon votes for March, next month will probably feature Burning Star or After Burner II unless a bunch of people all vote for something else at the last minute.

I didn't realize that Hirow was supposed to be pronounced "hairo" until I read those dialogue translations. Interesting.

Thanks as always!

EDIT: Were those dialogue translations part of the source, or did you provide them as additional material? Spiritual Larsa doesn't have much to say, but I'd be curious to see if her personality is less... nasty... in that fight.

Thanks everyone! I'm hard at work on the Fantasy Zone interview for next month right now, since based on the votes already in, it's almost certain to be selected.

@CStarFlare, I was using a jpwiki (that didn't have the Spiritual Larsa text) which had written out the dialogue, but I realize Cave has it all on their site. I'll try to get to that later this week and append it. S_Fang is right that there is a translation of the dialogue in that gamefaqs FAQ (I guess the text was translated for the iOS release?), and it looked fine to me, so there's always that in the meantime.

@To Far Away Times, yeah, if you read some of the other interviews about Mushihimesama, they talk a lot about wanting to make Original Mode first, and adding Maniac because they were concerned a simpler, "stoic" STG would alienate Cave fans. I've never really read anything like that for Futari, except what Ikeda says here--that both Original and Maniac were being promoted equally this time.

yeah, the Kotaku thing was a nice surprise. I'd sent them a couple e-mails in the past about different articles, but had never gotten a response. I think the gamasutra Mega Man post really raised the site's profile enough for them to consider it.

As I say on the about page, the whole site started as an outgrowth of the translations I was doing on the forum here. When I was new to shmups I was really inspired by the helpfulness of the community here and resources available in strat guides etc, so I wanted to contribute back in my own way. Who knows, maybe a few visitors to shmuplations will actually become more interested in shmups after reading some of the general gaming content there, hehe.

It definitely feels great to have it be recognized. Honestly, I would have been happy to continue doing the site totally for free and "under the radar", but the time it all took just started to become unreasonable, so I'm really hopeful this bump will lead to more patreon support.

No shmup interviews on the horizon atm, though I did discover a cool little Pulstar interview in Neo Geo Freak magazine that I'd like to do soon.

bit of a shmup hiatus, but back now with a Senko no Ronde developer interview and Battle Garegga composer commentaries! Next month there's a special Zanac/Compile interview in STG Gameside #12, too, that I'm super excited about, and will probably translate right away hehe.

Yeah right, because Japanese developers are famously forthcoming about absolutely everything they ever worked on and don't display a hint of modesty. Western devs on the other hand are tight-lipped and closed-doored when it comes to self-promotion about anything they ever produced and shy away from the limelight continually.

Well done Blackoak, it's fair to say your site is about a million times more valuable than Kotaku.

Just a quick bump with a couple shmup related interviews I did this month, in case anyone here missed them. First, I finally got around to translating the Stunfest superplayer interview from 2014, which was featured in STG Gameside. It's similar to the previous one I did for Stunfest 2013, with a little more of the now-usual "musing on the fate of STG" thrown in.

I also did a shorter Espgaluda developer/composer interview. It has some comments from Ichiro Mihara of Arika on the PS2 port. Nothing too surprising there, but the interview with SOU1, the main music composer, will be of great interest to fans of the OST.

Still trying to find the time for that amazing Compile/Zanac interview from the recent STG Gameside volume...